As another round of First Friday tours began at Center City Brightwood Public Charter School I was immediately surprised by the number of students in the school in correlation to the number of grade levels offered. The Brightwood campus is one of six Center City Public Charter Schools located in DC and serves 251 students…

The language of the “Don’t Worry Crowd” never ceases to amaze me in its antiquated nature and inability to come to terms with the truth. Recently, perhaps the Don’t Worry Crowd’s biggest spokesperson, Diane Ravitch, was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  She almost speaks a different language than real reformers. They…

Coming into the month of October only reminds me that I have made it to the halfway point of my almost four month stay here in Washington, DC. That being said, I can already say that this has been an experience that I surely won’t forget, in part to recent events. This stay will always…

At the CER’s 20th Anniversary Gala and Awards Show, we heard a lot of sentences like this: “20 years ago to the day…” and “It was exactly one year ago when…”.  It got me thinking about what I was doing this exact time at one important time in my life, and how it compares to…

The Center for Education Reform (CER) conference room is filled beyond capacity with white polka dot boxes and there is a consistent assembly line in progress to tie the beautiful red bows atop the boxes. The guest list is checked over and over and over again to ensure it is correct. After the last couple…

Wherever there are elections, there will most assuredly be candidates paying lip service to their own interpretations of “education reform.” Naturally, many politicians favor the abstract concepts of “building better schools,” “accountability,” and an old favorite, “doing what’s best for our kids.” However, do these lofty statements on education make these candidates, reformers? What does…

As part of the First Fridays series of once a month charter school tours in DC, the school year kicked off with an interactive tour of a unique charter school in Columbia Heights. Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School opened its doors in 2011, currently serving students in grades pre-K through second. The school has…

Congratulations to the Houston Independent School District (HISD) on winning the 2013 Broad Prize for Urban Education, an annual grant given by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The Broad Prize is intended to distribute college scholarship grants to school districts that demonstrate large-scale improvements in student achievement.

Hello! My name is Ta Lynn Mitchell and I am the newest intern at the Center for Education Reform (CER). As a junior at American University, I have lived here in DC for the past 3 years and I have visited Bethesda Row on many occasions, not aware that CER, a pioneering organization in the…

Today is Constitution Day, marking the 226th anniversary of the document that laid the groundwork for the great experiment that is the United States of America. Through a series of Articles and Amendments, the Framers of the Constitution provided the blueprint for federalism -- that is the way in which the federal government interacts with…